


over and over, the only truth (everything comes back to you)

by brahe



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: A little bit introspective, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst and a Little Fluff, Cassian/jyn endgame, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Force-Sensitive Jyn Erso, Hurt/Comfort, Idk fam I just had this idea and it wouldn't leave so here we are, Jyn stays with the rebellion, Lots of illusions to scarif, Married Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus, Minor Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus, There's a lot of similes, bc I'm definitely super into that, bc apparently I'm super into that whoops, don't you mean the only universe, haha alternate universe, jyn/bodhi brotp bc it's the best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 04:07:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10586100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brahe/pseuds/brahe
Summary: She wakes up alone, and even when she's not alone, it feels like there's a part of her that's missing, a part of her that detached at the beach, that Cassian took with him, wherever he went.Or, Rogue One wakes up after Scarif. Cassian's gone and then he's back again, but Jyn's spent a year without him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> It's 1:20am and I wrote this all in one go bc I was listening to this town by niall horan and this idea wouldn't leave me alone. It didn't quite come out how I expected, but I still like it. Not sure if the ending is where I'm gonna leave it, but I didn't know what else to do with it, so. Anyway. Eventually I'll write something not jyn-centric. 
> 
> Title from this town.

Everything's a mess, after Scarif, to no one's surprise. They're all still alive by some miracle, plucked off the beach and away from the sure grips of death by a last rebel pilot, dropped into medbay with a list of injuries as long as the Empire's most wanted.

 

Jyn is the third to wake. Cassian was first, and then Baze. Bodhi comes around about week after Jyn, and but Chirrut takes his time.

She wakes up alone, which is nothing new. There's a part of her that's amazed she was even able to wake up at all; the memory of the horizon on fire will burn behind her eyes for the rest of her borrowed life, she knows.

The first person she sees is Bodhi. She's cleared to leave by the medical droid assigned to her a few hours after she wakes, and she wanders the halls until she ends up two rows over, pulls up a seat beside the bed Bodhi's laid up on, and takes her vigil. Everything still feels muffled, like she's still in the bacta tank, like there's an explosion louder than a supernova still ringing in her ears. It's numbing like nothing else in her life has been before, and it leaves her feeling as if she's not a part of her own body, feeling like she's floating in a space in between, where she's a mere observer to the whims of the universe, a spec of dust along for the ride.

 

Halfway through the second day, her mind drifts to the outside world. For a moment, she wonders about the others, the soldiers and the pilots and the rest of the rebellion, wonders if they've gone after that death machine, wonders if they even remember the bodies lying in the medbay.

And then she wonders why she's still here, why she's waiting in a chair beside a medical bed on this rebel moon. What's keeping her here?

Bodhi shuffles, then, groaning a little in his unconsciousness, and she comes to alert attention, watches his face carefully, and a voice whispers to her that this is her answer.

 

The first time she speaks since- _since_ , it's to Baze. The warrior finds her in Bodhi's room, offers her the same half smile and the same affectionate _little sister_.

"They say he'll be awake soon," she says, and Baze nods beside her. There's a kind of tension in the air that's simultaneously oppressive and welcome, the kind that comes from having a thousand things to say and the will to say none of them.

"Chirrut will not wake soon," Baze says. If Jyn looks hard enough, there's a deep pain in his voice, but she can't bring her heart to do it. In a sudden flash she's back to the edge of the water, Cassian's hand in hers, body around hers, and she _hurts_ , so fierce and so suddenly that it feels like a physical blow. Baze's hand comes to her shoulder and she jumps at the contact.

"I've heard nothing of the Captain," he tells her, and it's what she wants to know, but not what she wants to hear. The floating feeling is gone, now, replaced by something more tethered, more vicious. It pushes memories against the front of her mind, brushes them against her skin in soft whispers, presses against her chest like the weight of a planet. She allows herself to turn to Baze, meets his gaze, and she imagines it's similar to looking into a mirror in this moment. There's emotion in his eyes more wild than a need, more desperate than a desire, clouding his face like a violent storm. He wears pain well, she knows, she _feels_ , but this is a different kind that chips away at him like wind on a mountain. In a brief moment of strength, she hopes that there'll be something left of him by the time Chirrut wakes. _Hopes._

 

Jyn's pulled herself away from the medbay wing of the base, but can't pull herself any further away, and so she enlists legitimately, makes it to Sargent almost immediately.

Bodhi stays, too, because the galaxy is starting to fall to one side of a line or the other, and the other doesn't take kindly to those like him. This side hardly does, either, but stares and rumors and fights are pale comparisons to the death he should of had many, many times over. He's shed the Imperial clothes, but it seems much harder to shed the Imperial label, his history following him around like a physical thing, and shadow always there, just at the edge of sight. It takes longer than Jyn, but he makes it as a pilot, sticks to ships because they're what he knows, the only constants in his life engines and motor oil and warp drives. Eventually they start to trust him, eventually he starts to see something else beside explosions on the insides of his eyes, eventually he realizes he will never forget, not even a little, and it is what it is.

 

They're both stuck on the ground, though, for something like mistrust or wariness or uncertainty in the eyes that meet theirs across board tables and mission pads.

It feels like some sort of purgatory, a limbo state like the floating from those first few days of this new, stolen life. It's almost like she's waiting for something, like this is the calm before the storm, the atmosphere crackling around her, ready to break at the right words.

"Captain Andor's gone," Draven says, contempt on clear display, and those are the right words. She knows he's not gone in the dead sense, because she could feel that, would feel it, but it explains the weird missing thing that's been haunting her since consciousness came back. The phantom feeling of his arms around her, his body pressed to her, refuses to leave, even after she knows what it is. She realizes with sudden clarity that she's lost for the first time in her life, tied to this thing she hardly supports by some invisible string, pulled to it by a magnet that's already, apparently, long gone.

"Undercover mission," Mothma supplies, her tone lighter, less harsh. She's a commander at the core, Jyn knew from the beginning, and she's finally coming into her element as the Alliance turns to war. "He left the day he woke up."

 

 

In less than six months, Jyn becomes the best damn Sargent the Rebellion has ever seen. Half the things she does are well above her title, but she doesn't care, and they certainly don't either. She's on the base when the Death Star comes into the sky over Yavin, stares up at the artifical moon with something that tastes like determination and pride and fear rolled into one, the bitter twang of memory sitting on the back of her tongue. She feels helpless on the ground, but she's got a comm directly to Bodhi's x-wing, and it ties her to the fight as much as it can.

She's on the first transport to Hoth, the first of the crew that settled the new base, carves out _hope_ from the ice with every room they add. It's smaller than Yavin, among other things, and she ends up in a bunk with Bodhi, where neither of them really sleep. Most nights they're up, silent, breathing in tandem but not speaking, a million things in the air making it too dense for words, anyway. On the occasions they do sleep, it's fitful and noisy, sheets rustling and muffled screams when pain comes back like something freshly inflicted, mentally and physically. Those nights they wake each other up, and those are the nights they talk, about anything and everything, about the _before_  and the _after_  and how this life still tastes just a little off, like a soup without the seasoning, how their jobs fit a little strangely, like borrowed shoes, how their lives from _way_ before have faded into a distant, fuzzy feeling that's like looking at a holo of static.

 

Eventually the Cassian-shaped hole in her life fades to just this side bearable. Bodhi can hug her without it feeling like a tear in her chest. She works training with Chirrut and Baze, tries not to let their happiness hurt her too much. There's a light surrounding them that burns her eyes if she looks at it for more than just a moment, and it burns at something behind her heart, hot enough that it would consume her if she's not careful.

It's not love that claws at her, she knows, because love is a happy thing, love is dancing and joking and laughing and sharing a jacket and _sticking around_ , love is sweet and pure and gentle and nothing she's ever had, because she isn't built for soft things like that. Love is more than the memory of an embrace, of a moment of stillness, of a face pressed into her neck, a heart beating in time with hers. It must be.

 

 

It's probably been a year of this second life when the embers in her chest flare into a fire that doesn't want to burn her alive. She's sitting on Bodhi's x-wing, handing him tools, when a u-wing flies into the hanger, familiar like a favorite song, and she can't take her eyes away.

The cargo door falls open, and she watches as nothing happens, and then an astromech rolls out, and she feels like a fool, curses this _hope_  that runs like fire in her veins, curses the way it takes away her sensibility and her control.

But then there's a human walking out, one Jyn had resigned herself to never seeing again, and suddenly that hope turns into fact and it's entirely paralyzing.

 

The tools fall out of Bodhi's hands when that familiar fur-lined jacket comes into view. His reality is coated in a heavy dose of deja-vu, gives it a surreal quality that makes him wonder if he's finally lost his mind. But everything stays real, even after he rubs his eyes and blinks and looks away and back again. He finds his feet then, everything coming back in, and he's pushing through the gathered crowd to get to the opened plane, pushing through until he's looking straight at Cassian in the flesh, and then pushing again until he's got his arms around Cassian's shoulders in a desperate imitation of a hug.

Cassian makes a surprised sound but hugs him back, lets it linger longer than they should, and there's a weight Bodhi was carrying that's suddenly lifted, leaving him light headed.

"I thought you'd be dead," Bodhi says.

"Not quite."

Bodhi steps back to really look at him, takes in the longer, lighter hair, the scruffier shadow, the heavier set of shoulders. 

"Jyn's gonna kill you," Bodhi says, and Cassian blinks.

Hardly for the first time since Cassian left, guilt rushes over him like a bucket of ice water.

"Where is she?" he asks. A part of him had wondered if she ever woke up, if she ever came back from the beach, when he let himself think about her.

"Right here, asshole," comes a sound from behind him, one straight out of his head, and he whirls around.

Jyn's got her hands on her hips, typical Sargent's jacket a little big on her frame. She looks like fury personified, a hurricane in her stare, a frown like a criminal punishment. The guilt surges forward again.

"Unlike you," she adds, and in an instant he wishes he could go back and choose to stay, to ignore the mission for once in his life and choose something he _wanted_ , something his heart ached for.

"Well," he says, "I'm back now."

 

 

Jyn holds out for a week. She ignores the fire that's still burning in her chest, ignores the way his voice sends her back to the beach, the elevator, the vault, the stolen ship. Jyn Erso is not the type to forgive easily, and this is a transgression deeper than betrayal. She wants to know why, why he abandoned them, abandoned _her,_ but her resentment wins for six days.

She breaks in the middle of the cantina. It's busy like always, although it's quieter here because of the snow-packed walls. Cassian's standing three paces from her table, stopped on his journey by a pilot Jyn can't remember the name of. Her ears strain to hear his voice without permission from the rest of her, her gaze trains on where his hands are curled around the edges of his meal tray.

"Just leave it," he says, nodding to the pilot, and it's that that does her in. She leaves Hoth behind for Scarif, returns to the top of the tower in the most vivid memory yet, feels the ghost of Cassian's hand around her arm, her side against his, his voice a harsh whisper to _leave it, leave it, it's done._

And it's Cassian's hands on her face, in real life, that bring her crashing back in, and she finds she's crying.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm _sorry_ ," Cassian's saying, a litany against the top of her head when he pulls her to him. It's as comforting as it is painful, half of her vision taken up by a brilliant, burning sea, and the other occupied by the fabric of Cassian's shirt. She grips at his shirt, gets control of her breathing the best she can.

"I don't forgive you," she says, because she doesn't, wonders if she ever will. Cassian had sucked her in, brought her to a home for the first time in _years,_ made himself a piece she came to rely on, and then he had left, like everyone else in her life, and it had torn into her like all the ones before, opening up the old wounds as it went.

"I know," he says. "I couldn't stay."

She hates it, but there's a part of her that understands, that gets why he left and stayed away for so long. Doesn't mean she has to like it.

"Don't do it again," she says. 

"Never," he agrees, and she pulls her head away from under his chin to look him in the eyes. She misses his warmth already.

"Mean it."

"I do," he says, and for a moment it feels like that first exchange on the ship to Jedha, their fledgling relationship already much deeper than it should have ever been.

"I do," he repeats, and she kisses him. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I just read back over this like two weeks later and I don't remember writing this at all ahh sleep deprivation 
> 
>  
> 
> For those interested, I'm hoping to get back into writing more regularly, so for those of you waiting for the rest of TMHHMS (sorry sorry sorry) that'll be coming eventually, and there's some new fandoms in the line-up (*cough*defenders*cough), plus plenty more rogue one bc it's out on DVD now so yay for suffering whenever I wish.


End file.
